Monday, March 28, 2005

Getting caught up

Having spent some time distracted from blogging by the bothersome work I do for a living as well as the other creative pursuits I do for nothing, I am just now getting caught up reading some of my friends' blogs. Via e p o n y m o u s comes the image from Banksy below


The site is really worth a stop. Here is part of the manifesto page, which quotes the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO, one of the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen:
I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. . . . It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. . . . I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

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